


Observations

by sweeterthankarma



Category: Thoroughbreds (2017)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 23:39:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17293496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweeterthankarma/pseuds/sweeterthankarma
Summary: Amanda watches the sun shine down onto the perfectly trimmed grass of the Reynolds’ family estate and imagines that she can see each individual ray, each separate atom hitting the Earth. It’s a weird thing to do, but she’s been doing it a lot lately and she thinks she likes it. Maybe. She’s not sure. She thinks she likes it as much as she can like anything.





	Observations

Amanda spends a lot of her time staring at nothing.

Well, maybe it’s not nothing — and thoughts like that are exactly the kind she’s been having lately— so, to rephrase, she spends a lot of her time staring at the world around her. She looks at boring things, like the dents in old brick walls and the rust on fire hydrants and the ridges on the flower vase that always sits exactly in the center of Lily’s dining room table. She’s been  watching the meticulous way Lily maintains her house, usually to her step-father’s tastes, and she’s been trying to wonder why she even bothers. She hates him, after all. 

But something Amanda has been discovering in this introspection of hers is that people are a lot harder to understand than she anticipated. She barely understands herself, after all, so she isn’t really sure what she expected when she started studying other people, but so far she knows that Lily is different from her, in a variety of ways. Whether it’s for better or for worse, Amanda doesn’t know. (Probably for better.)

Amanda doesn’t think she has the capability, emotionally or mentally, to examine people the way she wants to — the way that they deserve to be examined . These kinds of things need to be done accurately or not at all, otherwise, there’s no point. It’s scientific, or at least it should be, she thinks.

Besides, if she were going to do that — if she were really going to dive into other people’s minds—  she should know herself first, inside and out, and if she’s being frank, she’d rather not do that. There’s nothing to know, anyways. So, instead, she focuses on the world around her. 

She watches the sun shine down onto the perfectly trimmed grass of the Reynolds’ family estate and imagines that she can see each individual ray, each separate atom hitting the Earth. It’s a weird thing to do, but she’s been doing it a lot lately and she thinks she likes it. Maybe. She’s not sure. She thinks she likes it as much as she can like anything. 

She’s been wondering if when she knows things, she’ll be able to feel them. If she’s aware of what she should feel, of how the world works and therefore how the associated feelings that normal people have occur along with that, maybe she can reverse this numbness that she’s succumbed to. 

(But it’s all she’s ever known, really, and if she’s being honest, she doesn’t hate it. How can she? She doesn’t even know what hate feels like.)

She thinks “succumbed” is the wrong word, but a part of her feels like she can’t change herself, so maybe she is a victim like her psychiatrist made her out to be. She’s trapped in her own mind and her own numbness — that’s what he’d said, that man with a PhD and a balding scalp. What did he know about her mind? 

She thinks she should feel afraid of being trapped. But she doesn’t. She feels fine. She feels nothing. And she’s okay with that. 

Changing herself, though — that’s an idea. She couldn’t do it,  not even if she tried, because god knows she has (is there even a god, anyways?), but it’s an interesting concept. Maybe the problem resides in the truth of the matter: the fact Amanda has only ever tried because that’s what she thought she should do— to fix herself, to make herself normal, adequate, enough— and she hasn’t ever really wanted it. 

But she’s had no reason to change, so why would she? She doesn’t have to feel pain, terror, tragedy, fear, or even embarrassment like normal people have to suffer through. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe she’s lucked out. Maybe the world would be better off if everyone was like her.

Amanda doesn’t have an answer to that. She doesn’t have an answer to anything, really, so she spends her time analyzing the space around her as much as she can with her limited knowledge of how the world works. See, she’s trying to become smarter, at least when it comes to basic information about life, because she’s realized how little she knows about things that matter. 

But then she gets to thinking, and she’s learned that she’s good at thinking. Does anything matter, really? Is it all a socially constructed string of lies, a database of conspiracies covered up with conspiracies covered up with aesthetic propaganda? She doesn’t have the slightest clue, and the only thing that makes her feel better is the fact that no one else knows either. That, she can tell. People are never as smart as they pretend to be. Not even Lily.

When Lily had tutored her (correction,  _ tried _ to tutor her) she’d had a revelation of sorts —  as much of a revelation that someone like her can have — and she’d decided she wanted to learn things, important things. About life, about the world, about the reasons why ordinary things happen. It’s strange that most people don’t take the time to learn about the world around them, especially when it all could come crashing down at any moment, leaving people senseless and blind. She told Lily this, and she’d looked surprised, but nodded nonetheless.

Maybe Amanda is preparing for that kind of moment. Maybe she’s preparing for a riot of some kind, for multiple riots, for a doomsday or maybe  _ the  _ doomsday. Maybe she’s preparing for the apocalypse. (Maybe Lily is too. Maybe they’re preparing for it together.) 

It’d be a cool way to go, she can’t deny it. She thinks she’d like to see the end of the world. She wouldn’t be against seeing it, at least. It’d be crazy, probably. Or maybe it wouldn’t be. Maybe all the theorists and philosophers were wrong and the world just ends, like it was never even there, like it was nothing, like they were nothing, like she was nothing. 

Amanda likes thinking about these kinds of things. She won’t tell Lily that she believes it, just because she doesn’t want to scare her. She’s pretending it’s a hobby instead.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr under the same username, sweeterthankarma.


End file.
